Google have announced a partnership with BMW in germany to enable you to send directions to car when you need to find somewhere and have a suitable gps navigation. That's a cool feature but a) are users driving along the road and googling directions at the same or b) have not learnt how to use the GoTo button on the gps unit already? Either option sounds rather scary to me.
Recently in GPS Category
I've been trying to use Microsoft's WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin's mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.
However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo's need to be loaded into Picassa - this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn't like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.
As it will take some time to load the cruise photo's, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.
Each time I spend a bit of time on the geocaching.com website (which is a LOT of time) I am amazed at how good the programming is and how useful the features are. I'm not sure how much of it is .net programming or how much of it is some fancy java programming, but the location based logic is really good. I tried (re)-using the MAP-IT screen which gives me the list of all caches nearest my home co-ordinates and lists the ones I have not done yet but in a graphical view as opposed to a table view. Previously I'd written this facility off as useless outside the US as it doesn't show you any street level detail that you would get in the US locations, but it does show you the relative positions of caches as in the picture.
I really didn't think I'd see those four words in one sentence, but there is a Livejournal user, kitiara who blogged about Geocaching and firing a machine gun in the same post!
Sounds like double the fun!
My GPS is broken - I turned the gps back on when leaving my parents I got the message that there was no map loaded in the gps, initiating upload - no idea how it's done it, why its done it or how I'm going to fix it!
A quick visit to Matalan was very profitable this afternoon. I got a waterproof jacket, with inside pocket for mobileGPS, another one for headphonesPDA and other pockets for the pens, paper, mobile and goodies. As it was only £17.50 it will keep me warm and I won't have to worry too much about damaging or getting it dirty. I also got some waterproof tracksuit bottoms so I can wear them alone or over my work trousers and go caching without worrying too much about getting muddy. Just need a portable shoe/boot cleaner now and I'm set!
Just spoke to the Where's my Rebate helpline on 1-800-390-2344 to see where my $50 rebate is for the GPS that I purchased on the 24th November. Apparently it's been approved and will be sent out on the 25th Febuary....now call me cynical but I don't remember signing up to be a bank for Magellan for three months....now let me see - $50 at 19.7% APR for three months is...... (I've no idea)
Went up to the Angel of the North Cachethis afternoon. The statue isn't that big and very rusty. There was a plaque by it, giving a description of the statue, but no details as to why on earth they decided to commission it and stick it on the top of a hill!
Spent the last two days on three Geocache's. Yesterday I hid my first Geocache near the office - about 10 mins walk away - as of yet, 24 hours later, no-one has visited (although it took a while for it to be approved). Today i went back and tried to find the Bosley Locks one and STILL can't find it. In disgust I went up to the Cloud, which overlooks Congleton and found the Cumulonimbus Crevice cache and left my double-blank travel bug there.
Yesterday I found my first year of the year, which was a first to find, and also my first "first to find". What made it even better was that looking at the logs for the cache, 3 other people also went looking for it on the same day but none of them could find it. It's a shame that I couldn't find the second cache that I was looking for at Bosley though :-(
A good flash based interface to uk geocaching maps provides the ability to also query on caches near town names.
GPXView is a useful PocketPC2002 program that will read in gpx files. No need to convert to ebooks or anything. The only downside I have noticed so far is that it is not quite perfect in measuring distances away from "home". Great for keeping a copy of nearest cache's on the pda though.
Got my dad hooked on Geocaching yesterday when we all went out on a walk to a travelbug and then went on to a nearby cache which had it's co-ordinates hidden in the first cache. Dad was the first person to find both these cache's and I thinked he's hooked. When we got home I logged the two finds and also tried to purchase some travelbug dogtags of my own but the server which takes the money was "unavailable - please try later". So I'm still waiting to place the order.
A great database of Geocaches on the mobile phone
We were going to stay at a friends house in Indianapolis the day before we flew back to the UK. They had moved to the house two weeks before we were staying so we didn't know where it was. I put their address into mapquest and got driving directions and printed them off without proof reading the instructions (bad idea!). I also got the co-ordinates for the house and put them into the GPS and we set off.
After a three hour drive we arrived in Indy and started to follow the instructions. Kristen thought there was something wrong when the instructions took us downtime and through the centre of the city among office blocks - she was convinced that there was no way our friends would live downtown. Eventually we got to a T-Junction which totally contradicted the directions we were following and we were stuck. We then checked the top of the page for the directions and realised that it didn't even have the full address on the page - instead giving directions to 6000- 6999 of the street (and we didn't know their house number!) The GPS showed that the co-ordinates for the house that I had punched in were about 10 miles west of where we currently were. After a minute or so of arguing and strong words about the uselessness of Mapquest we decided that we would not be any worse of than we currently were and we'd follow the GPS. We eventually got to the area where the house was and circled the neighbourhood going down loads of different roads trying to get near to the house on the gps (we were about 30 feet away at one point!) but we just could not find the road we were looking for. Eventually we decided to go back to a Gas Station, ring home to get their phone number and then ring for directions. Turns out we were less than a mile away and 2 minutes later we were on their doorstep. Looking at the GPS screen we had gone all the way round the house (and the waypoint was spot on) and the screen looked like an etch-a-sketch drawing! Next time I'll forget mapquest and use waypoints, although I'll have to find a way of creating a route rather than just a source/destination point.
I've taken the GPS outside in the UK a couple of times and so far I've not been as impressed as I was with it in the US. The coverage of satellite GPS in the UK is a LOT worse than in the states. I was getting 6 satellites in the US, so far I've only had 2 over here, and none of the bars in the satellite screen have gone black (which it should). So far I've not been able to get better than a 2d fix. The really annoying thing is that when I get to my home town the unit warns me that I've got bad GPS coverage. All of the above have been whilst in the car so I may get better coverage outside it, but the unit was used primarily in the car whilst in the states for navigating (see next entry) unless I was actually looking for a geocache.
Added 4 new caches to our list of Geocaches found - it was a fun afternoon, with the caches getting easier and easier as the afternoon wore on!
Found out that there are several UK Geocaching sites, Buxley's Geocaching site, GeocacheUK, Geocaching Association of Great Britain, Chris & Maria's links, Navicache and
Found my first geocache today. We had driven past it several times but not had the time to stop and look until today.
Now i've got to go work out how to use it - back later.
I placed an order on amazon (the cheapest I could find) for a Magellan SporTrak Map Handheld GPS unit which will hopefully be of use to use when Geocaching. I took a quick look at the geocaching website this morning and found out there is a cache within a mile or so of where we are staying, so that will be an easy and quick way to test everything out without the running the risk of getting lost in the Ohio wilderness :-)
